British record company. The name dates from 1914, when it was used for the first portable gramophone to be manufactured, produced by Barnett Samuel & Sons of Finsbury, London. That firm had originally been founded in Westminster in 1832, by Henry Solomon, whose trade included the distribution of musical instruments; the music side of the business had been taken over by Barnett Samuel in 1860–61, who by the beginning of the 20th century traded in records and ‘talking machines’ as well as instruments and by 1912 was also manufacturing records on the Odeon, Fonotipia and Jumbo labels. After World War I the company concentrated on gramophones and instruments. In 1928, when the Samuel family retired from the business, the Decca Gramophone Company Ltd was founded; its shares were bought the next year by the Decca Record Company Ltd, which also bought the record factory at New Malden, south-west of London, of the Duophone company.
The stockbroker who had arranged the sale, Edward Lewis, joined the board in 1931 and became chairman. He soon signed an exclusive contract with Jack Hylton, the company's first substantial success in the popular field, the area in which it was principally active before World War II. In 1932 he bought rights to parts of the American Brunswick catalogue, whose artists included Duke Ellington, the Mills Brothers and Bing Crosby, and in 1937 Vocalion, which recorded Billie Holiday and Ellington's small groups, came into the catalogue when Decca acquired Crystalate, whose Swing Series they continued until 1940.
The first issue of Decca recordings, in 1929, had included a 12-inch 78 r.p.m. record of Delius's Sea Drift, sung by Roy Henderson with the New SO, and a recording of Handel concertos conducted by Ernest Ansermet followed later that year. Most of the classical releases of the 1930s came from the German Polydor catalogue, to which Decca acquired British rights, but the company also began to make its own classical recordings, with such artists as Henry Wood, Clifford Curzon, Hamilton Harty and Boyd Neel.
An American branch, Decca Records Inc., was established in 1934 in New York. It supplied American popular recordings to the parent firm and its subsidiaries in Europe (of which Dutch Decca was particularly active in jazz recording); its catalogue included recordings by Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Woody Herman and Lionel Hampton. The American firm became independent during World War II, when British assets abroad had to be sold; it later had links with Coral and Brunswick, and was taken over by MCA in 1959. In 1947 the British firm set up a new subsidiary, London Gramophone Corporation, to distribute its records in the USA; it was among the earliest, in 1949, to issue LPs there. London also acted as British distributor of records made in the USA, serving during the 1950s for several labels including Essex and Imperial (it was thus at the forefront of rock and roll, with such artists as Fats Domino, and Bill Haley and the Comets) as well as Atlantic, Specialty and Sun, and later Hi Records.
A highly successful period for the British company began in the 1950s. In 1950 a company, Teldec, was set up in association with the German Telefunken company for technical research, an association that continued for nearly 40 years. Also in that year Decca, under the technical guidance of Arthur Haddy, launched ‘the world's first and only ffrr microgroove long-playing pick-up’ and issued the first LP records in Europe: ‘ffrr’ (full frequency range recording) on the new vinyl discs had a vividness and immediacy that placed Decca in a strong position among record companies. Decca was also early to issue stereo recordings, as ‘ffss’ (full frequency stereo sound).
During this period the catalogue and roster of artists was greatly enlarged, under the guidance of Maurice Rosengarten, to include, for example Karl Böhm, Erich Kleiber, Georg Solti and Ansermet among conductors, Wilhelm Backhaus, Julius Katchen and Curzon among pianists, and many singers. The company issued a series of Italian opera recordings with such artists as Renata Tebaldi, Giulietta Simionato, Mario del Monaco and Carlo Bergonzi, and several recordings in association with the Vienna Staatsoper, including works by Mozart and Strauss, some of them under Böhm, where the casts included Lisa della Casa, Hilde Gueden, Anton Dermota and Cesare Siepi, while Kirsten Flagstad and Wolfgang Windgassen sang in the company's Wagner recordings. The climax was the enormously successful first complete recording of the Ring, made in Vienna under Solti and issued in 1959–66 in the face of widespread scepticism about its economic viability.
The Ring was produced by John Culshaw, who also worked with Benjamin Britten on an authoritative series of recordings of his works, his operas in particular. Culshaw was one of a team of outstanding record producers that included Christopher Raeburn and later Peter Wadland, whose specialization in early music gave Decca, through L'Oiseau-Lyre, its associate company and later its subsidiary, a strong position in that area with their recordings by, for example, the Consort of Musicke under Anthony Rooley in Renaissance repertory, the Academy of Ancient Music under Christopher Hogwood in Baroque and Classical music (including the complete Mozart symphonies), and the Drottningholm Opera under Arnold Östman in Mozart operas, all using period instruments and techniques. Other important issues include the recording of Haydn's complete symphonies by the Philharmonia Hungarica under Antal Dorati, in the early 1970s, and several operas with Joan Sutherland in leading roles, chiefly conducted by Richard Bonynge. In the 1990s Decca issued the ‘Entartete Musik’ series, of supposedly ‘decadent’ music banned under the Nazis. The company's roster of artists during the last decades of the 20th century included Vladimir Ashkenazy, Riccardo Chailly, Luciano Pavarotti, Cecilia Bartoli and Renée Fleming; its issues included the popular recordings of the ‘three tenors’ (Carreras, Domingo, Pavarotti).
In the popular field Decca held a high position between the 1950s and the 1970s, with a notable roster of artists including Mantovani, Vera Lynn, the Rolling Stones and Tom Jones, and via licence deals with American companies it distributed the recordings of many leading American performers, among them Elvis Presley, the Everly Brothers, Roy Orbison and others. In the 1970s, however, Decca's share of the popular market declined.
In 1980, the year of Sir Edward Lewis's death, Decca formally became part of the Polygram group, with Philips and Deutsche Grammophon; popular releases were abandoned and Decca became exclusively a classical label. Polygram was taken over by Seagram in 1998; the Decca and Philips components were integrated as the Decca Music Group Ltd within the Universal Music Group (formerly MCA).
J. Culshaw: Ring Resounding (London, 1967)
J. Culshaw: ‘50 years of the Decca Record Label’, Gramophone, lvii (1979–80), 171 only
P. Gammond: ‘The Coming of Age: Recording in the LP Era’, The Music Goes Round and Round: a Cool Look at the Record Industry, ed. P. Gammond and R. Horrocks (London, 1980), 24–47
R. and C. Dearling, with B. Rust: The Guinness Book of Recorded Sound (London, 1984)
A. Cimino: Great Record Labels: an Illustrated History of the Labels behind the Stars (London, 1992)
C. Larkin, ed.: The Guinness Encyclopedia of Popular Music (London, 1992, 2/1995)
G. Marco, ed.: Encyclopedia of Recorded Sound in the United States (New York and London, 1993)
MAUREEN FORTEY